Home from the Shore

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Vant lifted his hands and let them drop.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "There's nothing I can do then, I just explain the situation, that’s all my job is. You know, historically, the tail's never been let to wag the dog very long." He ran his eyes around the semicircle. They met Johnny's eyes, paused for a second, then passed on.

  “If the rest of the Cadets'll come back voluntarily . . . Otherwise, public opinion’s going to get out of hand." He looked at Chad.

  "We don’t want to declare war on you.”

  "No," said Chad. "You don’t want that."

  Vant waved an easy hand and disappeared. The rest got up and began to shove their chairs back to make a full circle, breaking out at the same time into a clatter of conversation.

  Johnny found himself next to Chad.

  "He talked like they caught some of us?" Johnny said. Chad looked at him.

  "Yes," he said. "A hundred and twenty-nine didn't make it to the sea. They’re holding them at Congress Territory on Manhattan. It'd have to be there. The only shred of legal right they have to arrest our people would be under international law. Vant told us they may be tried as deserters.”

  "Deserters?” Johnny stopped shoving his chair.

  “Why should they?” he heard Toby Damley, of the Communications Dome of the Castle-Home, his slightly shrill voice rising over the others.

  "We can't let them put a leash around our necks. But we can't let them put those young people before a firing squad, either." Glancing across the room, Johnny saw Toby’s small, square face was rigid and dark. "What can we do?"

  Beside Johnny, Chad sat down. The circle was formed now. Johnny saw he was the only one standing. For some reason, following the shock of what he had just heard, he found his mind filled by a memory of the eye of the killer whale, as he had seen it watching through the openings in the muzzle. The dark eye, hidden of meaning,and steady. In the same moment something moved in him. It suddenly seemed to him that he felt the distant, but actual presence of the hundred and twenty-nine imprisoned sea-born, as he had felt Tomi between his hands.

  ‘‘We can save them, of course,” he said. “We can go rescue our own people."

  They all stared at him. The roomful of people were silent. Though the four walls of the room barred all about him, he seemed to sense the eye of the killer whale upon him, steadily watching.

  Chapter 6

  "Johnny," said Patrick. "You mean take them back by force.”

  "Force if we have to," said Johnny. "Chad said they were holding them on Closed Congress Territory on Manhattan Island? We ought to be able to go in quickly, staying underwater right to the shore, and get them out again without trouble, before the landers know what’s happened. It'd never occur to them we'd do something like that. They think anywhere on land we can’t touch them. They really don’t understand—even now—what we can do, so they won't be expecting anything. We may be able to get in and get our people out almost without an argument. But, even if it means trouble—we can't leave them there."

  There was a murmur from the rest of those in the room. Pat looked around at them. He stood up, pushing his chair back.

  I think you're wrong," he said, simply.

  Turning, he walked out. The others looked after him for a long moment. Then, almost as if they had nowhere else to look, all their eyes came back to Johnny.

  "Pat may be right," Johnny said. “But I can't sit here and do nothing. If the rest of you agree, I'll go ahead."

  Chad sighed.

  "All right,” he said to the room at large. “Questions from the rest of you? Objections? Any comment?"

  There was silence.

  "I agree with Johnny," said Anea Marieanna. Her voice was calm and level. "But even if I didn't, he's spent over four solid years ashore with the landers. Patrick hasn’t."

  She lifted her single hand briefly.

  "I know," she said. “Patrick's been making trips ashore ever since he was twelve and the lands tarted playing his compositions. But visiting is one thing, living with the landers, something else. Even if I didn’t think Johnny was right, if I had no opinion either way, I’d have to go with Johnny because I think he understands better what's at stake here."

  She looked around from face to face, and one by one the others spoke to agree with her.

  The sea people could always move at a moment's notice. In an emergency they could almost dispense with the notice. Three hours later, a spindle-shaped formation of separate small-Homes in their craft-shape bored due east through the luminescent blueness of the hundred-fathom depth toward the New York shoreline. Before them, a vibratory weapon on low broadcast power herded the sea-life from their path. Their speed was a hundred and seventy knots.

  Piloting the lead craft, Johnny stood alone at the controls. The small-Homes behind held nearly three hundred men and women of the third generation, almost every one of the ex-Cadets who had been in Castle-Home at the time. The small-Homes they travelled in were supplied with automatic controls. The ex-Cadets had explosives,the radio equipment built into their masks, and take-apart sonic rifles and vibratory weapons of the sort the people used for sea-hunting. The element of surprise was on their side, they thought they knew where the prisoners were being held in Congress Territoiy, and they had a plan.

  In the control Section of the small-Home leading the formation, facing the empty, luminous waters showing through the transparent wall before him, Johnny felt detached from the speed of their movement. All sound was damped out and there were no signposts to gauge by, only the strange blue twilight of a hundred fathoms down that had so fascinated Beebe in his first bathysphere descent over a hundred years before.

  It glowed through the transparent forward wall to wrap Johnny in the unreal feeling of a dream.

  He, the sea, the ex-Cadets behind him—even the destination to which they were all hurtling—seemed ghostlike and unreal.

  The sound of footsteps behind him, in the small-Home where he was supposed to be alone, jerked him around sharply.

  "Patrick!" he said.

  Patrick, dressed like all the ex-Cadets in black, elastic cold-water skins, swim mask and fins, came like some large-footed monster out of the dimness in the back of the small-Home, to stand beside Johnny.

  "I stowed away," said Patrick. He was looking out at the depths through which they were rushing at cataclysmic speeds.

  "Why? You were against this." Johnny gazed steadily at him. Patrick slowly turned his head, but the apparently brilliant blue was so dim that Johnny could not make out the expression on Patrick's face.

  "Yes,” said Patrick. "I had to. It's true, you know, Johnny. You're a ringleader."

  “Ringleader?” Johnny leaned toward him, but still he could not make out the look on Patrick's face.

  "Yes," said Patrick. "Just as you were at the Academy, and before. You decide something on your own. And then you push it through because none of the other sea-born will fight you on it."

  "What did I push through?" Johnny let go the controls. On automatics, independently, thec raft bored on, leading the formation.

  "This." Patrick’s voice changed. "Johnny, turn back."

  "But we have to do this," said Johnny. "Why can't you see that, Pat? We’ve already broken away from the landers. We're different."

  "You think you're different," said Patrick.

  "I know it. So do all the third generation. You know it, Pat." He peered again, unsuccessfully. "You want to make me personally responsible for all this?"

  Yes, said the blur of Patrick’s face. “For a war we can’t win."

  "It's not war yet," said Johnny.

  "It's war. War with the land. I wish I could stop you, Johnny.”

  Johnny stood for a second.

  "If you feel like that, Pat, why’d you come along?"

  Pat laughed, a short, choking laugh.

  “I knew you wouldn’t turn back. I had to ask you one last time, though.”

  He turned and walked back, away. In the dimness
, the shape of him seemed to melt, rather than go off. Left alone, Johnny seemed to feel a coldness from the blue illumination as if it was shining x-ray-like through his flesh and bones.

  Here, in this moment, it was almost hard to remember how he and Patrick had been as alike in their thoughts as twin brothers, back in the years when they had gone off on their expeditions, alone with their dolphins and sonic rifles, living off the open sea like dolphins themselves. Now, in this new dimness, he could not even call clearly to mind his cousin’s face. What he remembered was overlaid by the picture of Patrick he had seen on the paper jacket of the Moho tape in a music store ashore.

  Johnny turned back to the controls, and put his mind to the coming work.

  At a safe distance offshore and fifty fathoms deep, they halted and clustered for a final council before going in to the land.

  Johnny locked the controls and turned from them. The small-Homes of the expedition had welded their changeable bodies back into a single structure with connecting irises, at a touch of the proper electric current through their plastic structure. Johnny went back into the rear rooms of his own small-Home and found Patrick lying on his back on the sleeping mattress there, but with his eyes open, focused on the ceiling.

  “Pat—" said Johnny.

  Pat's lips barely moved.

  "Yes?" he said.

  "Patrick, I've got to get together with Mikros and the others for last minute decisions and planning. As long as you've come, do you want to join us, and help?”

  "No,” said Patrick, still looking at the ceiling. "I'm sorry, Johnny. No."

  Johnny stood looking at him for an empty moment.

  "All right, Patrick," he said, gently.

  He turned and went forward again through the small-Home to the new iris connecting him with the small-Home adjoining. He stepped through it and found himself facing Walda Antoyan, already waiting with a pad of drawing paper under his arm. Walda was one of the in-betweens, those who had been too young to go with the third generation to the Space Academy, but too old to be considered part of the fourth generation to which Tomi and those Tomi’s age belonged. He was a slim, eager, sixteen year old with a brush-end mop of coarse black hair that did its best to stand on end whenever it was not soaked by sea water.

  "Come on, Walda," Johnny said. "We've got to find Mikros and the other group leaders.”

  "They’re on their way here, already. All the group leaders are," said Walda.

  "Oh?" Johnny said. “Who decided that?"

  "Everyone,” said Walda. "We've been talking back and forth on the command circuit all the way here. Everybody agreed it was easier for the rest to come find you, than for you to go find them."

  "I see," said Johnny. He started to turn back to his own small-Home, to hold the council there. Then he remembered the presence of Patrick.

  "All right," he said. "We’ll talk right here, then.” He sat down on one of the room’s two hassocks.

  “Let’s see your drawings,” he added.

  Walda passed him the pad and Johnny flipped through it. Walda was a superb sketch artist, in spite of his youth. Moreover, he was well acquainted with the Closed Council Territory they would be going into—Walda had visited an older second cousin of his, a lander who was one of the Closed Council delegates, there a number of times. If it had not been for that and his artistic genius, Johnny would have preferred not to have someone that young along. Although, as Walda was technically third generation, it would have been difficult to keep him from coming if he had insisted, in any case.

  The sketches were excellent, picturing every step of the way they would have to follow to the old blast shelter beneath the Secretariat building, where it had been decided that the captured ex-Cadets would probably be held.

  "Fine,” he said to Walda, handing the sketchpad back. "Make enough copies for each of the group leaders to take back to their own people.”

  Walda went off to make the copies with the equipment in the control section of his own small-Home, just as the first of the group leaders began to come through the iris in the opposite wall of the room.

  Of all the class representatives, Mikros was the only other to make it safely back to sea from the Academy; which was unfortunate, since the representatives were not only natural leaders, but recognized as such by the other ex-Cadets. Johnny needed a minimum of two lieutenants he could trust to know how he himself would decide, in case something happened to him,or in case he was not available to make decision sin an emergency. To match Mikros, he had picked an older third-generation hand—almost an in-between, one generation up from Walda named Eva Loy. Eva had been too old to go to the Academy, but she had been one of the early spokesmen for the third generation, and she was known and respected by all the ex-Cadets.

  The small-Home around Johnny was filling rapidly, now. There was a group leader for every fifty individuals in the expedition. Walda came back with copies of his sketches for everyone; and Johnny waited until these had been passed around, then spoke briefly to all of them as they sat, for the most part, cross-legged on the carpet of the small-Home, listening.

  "I've written out the general plan for you,” Johnny said, standing. "You should all have had copies of that before we left Castle-Home. If you haven’t, get Walda to make you copies from some one here who's got his copies along. Deliberately, I haven’t spelled things out. We'll rendezvous by part-groups of four and five, as indicated, at points surrounding Closed Congress territory and less than four blocks away. At click signals over the mask intercoms—you'd probably best keep your hand on the swim-mask in your pocket, so you can read the vibration of the transmission through your fingertips—we’ll all move together into the Territory, each group on its own taking care of any problems it runs into along the way. Don't put on your masks until you have to. There’s no point in attracting attention until we have to. Once we’re all inside the Territory, everyone but Mikros's, Eva Loy's groups and mine will spread out through the Territory, except the Conservatory. The three groups which will be holding the Conservatory have already been told who they are. The rest of you simply keep control of the Territory until my group, with Mikros's and Eva's, have got our people free; and we can all take off directly into the East River.”

  He looked around the faces in the room to see if they were all understanding him. Seeing they were, he went on.

  "The small-Homes needed to take us all off will have moved into position in the River opposite the Territory by the time we all reach the Conservatory,” he said. "They'll load up with everyone and carry us out to the rest of the small-Homes offshore. Then we’ll spread ourselves out among all the small-Homes, if we have time,and head for Castle-Home. If something goes wrong, anyone gets lost, or there are difficulties, everyone heads for Castle-Home on his or her own."

  He paused. They waited for him to finish.

  "I've deliberately held the planning our moves to a minimum," he said, "for two reasons. First, none of us have any experience with this, and so I'm trusting you all to reason your way through any trouble, rather than follow some plans laid down earlier, which by the time the trouble shows up may not even apply. Second, part of our strength and difference from the land is the fact we're used to thinking for ourselves—and that’s going to make it hard for the land to guess what we'll do next, if matters reach that point. So . . . good luck. Come to your group leaders or me with any questions you’ve got—now. There won't be a chance later."

  He stopped talking, and sat down. Surprisingly, only five of the leaders congregated around him with questions, and three of these were with the half-dozen who would be putting together some eleven of the small-Homes into a mockup roughly the shape and size of one of the lander deep-sea submarines, resting in the Brooklyn Navy Yard a handful of miles away.

  The planning and briefing completed, they went on into shallow waters. The Brooklyn Yard small-Homes split off from the others. The rest continued together to just off Jones Beach, where they were to drop all but the skelet
on crew which would take them on automatic controls to their station in the East River, just off Congress Territory.

  Patrick and Johnny among the others, they slipped into the water outside their small-Homes and headed in to shore, dispersing as they went, so that they emerged at last as individuals, on the early evening of a hot July day, among the lander swimmers and skin divers of the crowded beach.

  Johnny bought lander shirt and loose trousers from an automatic dispenser of disposable clothing in a pullman dressing room above the beach. His disassembled sonic rifle and swim mask with its intercom were tucked, out of sight,under his belt beneath the loose shirt. He boarded one of the small six-person cars of the Personal Rapid Transit line in to Manhattan.

  The car was empty, except for a young lander woman in her late teens or early twenties. She was reading a newstand tape in its throwaway display unit as they travelled, her narrow, serious face between its two wings of black hair intent on whatever it was she was absorbing from the printed page thrown on the small screen in her lap. She stirred him strangely, and without warning Johnny felt himself touched by a sense of loss at the thought that she was one of those he would never meet, never get to know or even speak to, because of the large forces that moved them.

  She left the P.R.T. car at a stop less than halfway in to Manhattan. Johnny continued to the destination he had programmed for the car,two blocks from the Closed Congress Territory.

  The Territory covered what had formerly been an area of twenty-blocks, running south from where the old Queensboro bridge had been. It was a show place, beautifully terraced and landscaped, and quite open, its grounds running down to the edge of the river. At midnight, Johnny reached the broad boulevard entrance at the north end and saw Mikros and Eva Loy come up to him.

  "All clear?" Johnny asked.

  “All clear," said Mikros. His big face under its black hair was grinning. Eva looked strangely calm under the lights of the Manhattan dome. Johnny himself felt a little as he had felt facing the killer whales with Tomi.

  "The reports are that there's no one to be seen outside the buildings, in the Territory,” >